By CALVIN CORDOVA
CEBU CITY – A popular tourist destination in southern Cebu will be closed for a week.
The Sumilon Island, known for its crystal-clear seawater and powdery-fine sandbar, will be closed for tourists from April 10 to 16 for a clean-up drive, said Oslob Mayor Jose Tumulak Jr.
Tumulak said the first three days of closure will be for the clean-up drives, while the remaining days will serve as a downtime for the island.
“Like humans, natures also need downtime. They also have to rest,” said Tumulak.
The 24-hectare Sumilon Island is located at the southern tip of Oslob town. It can be reached via a 30-minute boat ride from Tanawan, a barangay in mainland Oslob.
Tumulak said the week-long closure is necessary as trash left by tourists during the Holy Week remained uncollected.
The island, which is a popular snorkeling site, is visited by at least a thousand domestic and foreign tourists daily.
Tumulak said the fate suffered by Boracay Island in Aklan also prompted them to check if there’s a need to temporarily close Sumilon.
Starting April 26, Boracay Island will be closed for six months after some establishments were caught violating environmental laws that caused pollution in the island.
Tumulak said what happened to Boracay should serve as an eye-opener and local government unit officials should not wait for national authorities to step in to check the status of beaches and other tourist spots.
Meantime, while the biggest business group of Boracay Island has ceased to make any new statement, it earlier warned that its looming closure will have an adverse effect in the entire country’s tourism industry.
“The backlash from a total closure would certainly be felt for years and we all know that this will most definitely affect not only Boracay’s tourism industry, but the entire country’s tourism as a whole,” Boracay Foundation Inc. (BFI) noted in a recent statement.
“Boracay is a brand name, which the community painstakingly worked passionately to be recognized worldwide,” noted BFI.
Of the country’s 6.6 million tourists last year, more than 2 million tourists went to Boracay Island alone.
The 1,032-hectare resort island also contributed P56 billion to the Philippine economy for fiscal year 2017.
This influx of tourists was largely credited to decades of promotion not only domestically, but abroad. Boracay has been marketable to Chinese, South Koreans, Europeans and Americans. (With a report from Tara Yap)
